Hi,
is anybody aware of how I could solve the following problem:
I am working with a panel of more than 70,000 firms.
When running FE and RE I need to specify the panel unit (firms in my dataset). The panel unit has to be recorded a numeric variable, as I understand.
In my data the firm idendifier is a STRING variable with both numbers and letters. Example: firm with identifier FR12345 is different from firm with identifier GB12345.
I used DESTRING-IGNORE but
1) it is difficult to track down all the characters present in the firm identifier variable
2) Different firms will get the same id number. Example: FR12345 and GB12345.
I used ENCODE but I got the following error message (134): You attempted to encode a string variable that takes on more than 65,536 unique values.
Thanks,
Giorgia
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